PBS series on Jewish Americans falls short
By Michael Fox
Spanning six hours and 350 years, the PBS series “The Jewish Americans” that airs this month is an ambitious project by any measure. And yet, it is not a landmark program of lasting significance.
Veteran filmmaker David Grubin concocts a blend of factual, sociological and anecdotal (or oral) history that is always interesting, occasionally fascinating, but rarely revelatory. That might be the best one could hope for, given that the series has to be accessible to non-Jewish audiences without being so superficial that it turns off Jewish viewers.
“The Jewish Americans” is consistently intelligent-although occasionally bewildering in what it emphasizes or skips-but lacks daring.
The choice of title (as opposed to “The American Jews’) encapsulates the program’s thesis that immigrant Jews adapted and subjected their Judaism to American mores while making major contributions to the nation’s development. The critical dance between identity and assimilation is referenced a hundred different times over the course of the series, but the punch is almost always watered down.
Brazilian Jews were the first to venture here, arriving in New Amsterdam in 1654. Peter Stuyvesant protested that they would “infect” the colony, but he was overruled and by 1730 the first synagogue in American had been consecrated.
For a period in the 19th century, Charleston, South Carolina boasted the largest Jewish community in the country. As Jews settled around the country, Tucson, Tombstone and El Paso elected Jewish mayors. Judah P. Benjamin, the Senator from Louisiana who became the powerful Secretary of State of the Confederacy, gets a segment to himself.
“The Jewish Americans” hops a train to New York after the first hour to catch the wave of immigrants that flooded Ellis Island from 1880 to 1920. Here’s everything you already knew about life on the Lower East Side.
The most compelling detail is mentioned in passing: The established, assimilated and accepted Jews - German, mostly - by and large looked down on the unwashed masses of poor Russian and Eastern European Jews. They didn’t want to be identified with the unschooled ruffians, hustlers and boors that crammed the Lower East Side. (One might see a parallel in the attitude toward Soviet Jews who immigrated in the last 20 years, but it isn’t broached in the celebratory segment in the final episode devoted to the campaign of American Jews to save Soviet Jewry in the ‘70s and ‘80s.)
The Jan. 16 installment (“The Best of Times, The Worst of Times”) reminds contemporary viewers of Henry Ford’s anti-Semitism (although it barely mentions Father Coughlin, who surely reached as many people with his radio slurs).
The trial of Leo Frank in Atlanta in 1915, and his lynching, is presented as sober evidence for Jews in the South and beyond that assimilation was an illusion. But the crossover success of “The Goldbergs” on the radio (and later on television), along with Bess Myerson’s Miss America title and the insular, middle-class vibe of the Catskills resorts, reassured Jews that Jews had never had it better than they did in 20th Century
America.
“The Jewish Americans” loses some of its freshness in the final two-hour episode, “Home,” perhaps because the events of the last 60 years are so familiar to us.
Grubin could have opted to inject a blast of heat and unpredictability by focusing on issues currently galvanizing the Jewish community - intermarriage, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, etc. But “The Jewish Americans” is not remotely interested in ruffling feathers.
Even at six hours, it necessarily omits key figures or events. It’s ridiculous to devote so many sequences to popular culture without mentioning the Jewish influence on American intellectual life. Novelists Meyer Levin, Norman Mailer, Saul Bellow, Stanley Elkin and Joseph Heller - not to mention scientist Albert Einstein and economist Leo Strauss-deserve more than their snapshot (if that) flitting across the screen.
Alas, David Grubin’s tele-version of American Jewish history is the only one we will have for a long time.
“The Jewish Americans” continues to air at 9 p.m. Jan. 16 and 23 on PBS.